


Sun to Sun

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Family Drama, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-04-14 11:10:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4562382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's hard, Sarah knows, to love a son who demands your heart entire.  She forgives Winifred for not having enough heart to spare, even as she wonders how she can love both boys so much that it aches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sarah

**Author's Note:**

> Technically these are all separate drabbles based on tumblr prompts, but with a bit of massaging they fit well enough together. There's a fair bit of Irish mythology on changelings, and a little of the mythos of 1910s New York.
> 
> "There is but one and only one whose love will fail you never. One who lives from sun to sun with constant fond endeavor."

“I can still go to school!” Stevie protested, his bright blue eyes – his Da’s eyes – hazy with fever, drifting lazily over Sarah’s face without focusing on her scowl.

Sarah thought the scowl must be etched onto her face by now, the lines above her lips when she pursed them flat, the lines she remembered tracing on her Ma’s worn face, the mark of too many children and not enough to eat.

Steve was only one child, thank the Lord, but one child with enough sicknesses for a whole dozen of them.

And besides, she might as well have two children, one weaving to his feet, claiming he wasn’t a few hours from his deathbed, and the other snapping bubble gum, shirt already dirty and too short at the wrists.

“I can watch ‘im, ma’am,” Jamie Barnes insisted – _bairns_ , the both of them, though Jamie combed his hair back and put on airs like he was eighteen and not eight.  “Go on, Lizzie,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth, knocking his little sister gently with his cocked elbow.  “Get, before Stevie sneezes and you get snot all over your nice dress.”

Eliza Barnes, six years old and twice as clean as anyone else in Brooklyn Heights, blanched to the roots of her carefully braided hair and clattered down the stairs, the ribbons on her braids flying behind her.

Sarah braided the girls’ hair, when Jamie brought them over in the mornings, Eliza with her riot of brown curls, a wee Black Irish girl to the heart.  Becca-boo, who wanted her auburn hair to be blond, who followed Sarah’s son around on stubby toddler’s legs.  Nonie, the little princess, born with the fiery red hair that her mother had had, once, a bright copper penny in the passel of bootblack Barnes’.  Freckled and green-eyed, looking more like Sarah than her own son.

“Just in case you’d be forgetting, child,” she warned Jamie, her arms folded over the starched white of her nurses’ uniform, “it’s still a school day.  And you’re still a lad.”

“’m nearly ten,” Jamie griped, though he’d just turned eight the month before.  Sarah lifted her eyes to heaven, and Jamie mimicked her before uncrossing him arms and darting forward to catch Steven as her son finally swayed too far.

Jamie raised his eyebrows up at Sarah, huffing as he slung her son’s arm over his shoulder and hauled Steven over to the bed by the stove.  At eight years old, Jamie knew more about doctoring than Sarah had, her first months in the ward.

“’m fine,” Stevie declared, coughing through the words.  Jamie rolled his eyes.  Sarah had taught him that.  Had learned it from her oldest brother, Patrick, teasing Meggie, who wanted to be on the stage.  Meggie had died the winter Sarah turned ten, her cheeks rosy with the cough that shook her thin chest.  Patrick had died on Easter, for rolling his eyes at the English with a gun in his Irish hands.

“You have school, laddie,” Sarah told Jamie, soft as the hand she brushed through her son’s sweat-soaked hair.  Jamie shrugged and rolled up his sleeves, used the tongs to pull a brick from the oven, wrapping it in a towel and tucking it under the blanket at Stevie’s feet.

“School won’t pay the doctor,” Jamie shot back, sounding just like his Uncle Joe.  “’S fine, ma’am,” he told her, spitting on the stove and frowning when it didn’t sizzle.  “It’s the flu, ain’t it?  I know what to do.”

And he did.  Three little sisters and her son – Jamie’s narrowed, vigilant gaze took in every move Sarah made, like her Da at a poker game.  And the lad was right: school wouldn’t pay the doctor, but Sarah’s work at the sanitarium would.

She nodded, ruffled Jamie’s hair and pressed a kiss to Stevie’s warm brow, and wrapped herself in an old coat to brave the January air, colder than Ireland could ever be.

Meggie had been sick forever, all through the winter and into the spring.  Sarah, the youngest, the princess of her family, spent the long, dull months braiding her sister’s long hair, singing the songs full of words she couldn’t understand.  Painting Meggie’s face with lipstick and rouge that Sarah had nicked from Auntie Eílidh’s bag, giggling over the result in the silvered hand mirror.  Playing cards, Davey holding Meggie’s hand when her thin, pale fingers wouldn’t grip the waxy cards.

Almost twenty years later, Sarah saw Meggie every day.  Every turn about the ward, bedpans like Meggie’s chamber pot, her soiled linens after she couldn’t stand.  Lottie, one of the other nurses, broke through Sarah’s reverie with her booming voice, round-faced and Polish before she’d married an American soldier and found herself in Brooklyn.

“How’s your boy?” she shouted, only a few paces from where Sarah played poker with Mrs. Parker.  “He’s got that damned flu again, ain’t he?  You look dog tired, you do.”

Sarah shrugged, and nodded.  All the nurses – the whole ward – knew what a fragile thing Steve’s health was, as though he’d never been meant to live in Brooklyn, never meant to exist in the flashing lights and fancy corridors of 1920s New York.

Lottie’s hand came down hard on Sarah’s shoulder, squeezing her bones.  “I bought too much garlic from Jane,” she declared, lying through her good-natured, ruddy face.  “You may as well take the rest, see if it does that boy any good.  Too much garlic and Eddie won’t come close enough to kiss!”  She laughed, the sound bursting out from the straining buttons on her uniform, startling and infectious all at once.

Sarah took the garlic.  She would have been too proud, once, would have turned her head and spat at charity like her Da always had, the winter they’d nearly starved.  But she understood, now, why that winter her Ma had always come home with carrots stuffed into the pockets of her apron, potatoes they hurriedly peeled before Father came home.

Fathers had their pride.  Mothers did what they had to, to keep their children alive.

It was long past dark by the time Sarah struggled home, head ducked and bright, copper hair flecked with driving snow.  She would make soup, tonight.  She would be awake anyway, to press her wrist to Steven’s forehead, to rub worried fingers over his wheezing chest.

She could smell the stew before she’d made it up the stairs, a northern recipe she’d learned from a woman whose red hair had gone grey, from the stress of her husband or from the four mouths she couldn’t feed Sarah didn’t know.  A recipe that Sarah had, in turn, taught to the woman’s son.

Jamie had fallen asleep on the floor next to the bed, still holding the ladle in one small, grubby hand.  Sarah’s boy was sitting at the edge of the bed, swaddled in blankets, smiling down at his exhausted friend before turning that grin upwards, bright and clear-eyed for the first time in days.

“Told you I was fine,” he whispered, but had the good sense to stay wrapped up and out of the drafts.  Sarah rolled her eyes.

She set the garlic down on their three-legged table, grunting when she hoisted the dark-haired boy – her other son, the one she’d never fought to keep, but who came to the door like a stray cat expecting milk, meowing until she couldn’t turn him away – off the floor and onto the bed.

“Steven Grant, did you wear that poor boy out?” she tsked, prying the ladle out of Jamie’s hands and exchanging a quiet grin with her son, his crooked smile and pointed chin a memory of an aged hand mirror and her sister’s face.

Steve shrugged, something he’d learned God knew where, because Sarah certainly hadn’t taught him that.  “It’s been a long day?” he said, settling against her side, tucking himself under her arm and the snow-damp of her coat.

“I suppose it has,” she agreed, and sang her son the lullabies Meggie had taught her, kissing his red cheeks while Jamie slept.


	2. Winifred

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New York meant freedom, Zelda told Winifred, but no one warned her what freedom meant.

Winifred had married young.  Married, she called it, because she’d turned sixteen the year Britain joined the war and her father had told her they couldn’t afford to feed her that winter, so she’d best find her own way.  She’d found George, whose first wife had died in the spring—of the ‘flu, they said, but Winifred knew sickness nipped at hunger’s heels—and needed a lass able to keep his house and warm his bed.  George was tall, but walked with his shoulders near his ears and his face toward the ground.  He had eyes the color of a peat bog, and hair that might have been blond or brown, depending on the day.

  
No one had the money for a wedding.  And anyway, the priest had moved east two years before.

She didn’t bleed, the first full moon after her wedding night.  Or the second.  Winnie, doing the wash with the neighbors, knew it didn’t mean a thing.  The only thing living in her guts was hunger, growing bigger each week, gnawing at her bones.  She warmed George’s bed like a wife should, let him hike her nightgown above her waist and pinch at her breasts, but she was too busy rearing hunger to have space for a babe.

They walked to Dublin, the second winter, when they ran out of peat for fuel.  George had heard there was work in Dublin, and maybe enough scraps even for the Irish dogs.  Winifred’s shoes had worn through the soles by the time they arrived.  She would have slept right through Easter, only her neighbors played the crucifixion out in the streets, Irish martyrs on an English cross.

George joined the English army.  She nipped the uniform in at the waist, used the awl to make a belt to fit an Irishman, and waved as he marched away.  He’d left her his pay, promised he’d be back as soon as they won the war.  Made her promise to wait.  Winnie didn’t read so well, but she listened at the market, and in their crowded house: men who left for France made their promises in the wind.

The money was enough for one berth in steerage.  Winifred had no family in Dublin, and no welcome back home.  The next ship sailed for New York, and Winnie sailed with it.

There was plenty of work, in New York.  War meant profit, in America, and profit meant jobs.  Winifred stood in line at a factory, in a suit that bagged around her slim frame, her red hair pulled back until you couldn’t tell her from any other worker, until she could have been a man.  She slept at the boardinghouse, in a room with five other women, where at least one was always ill.

Zelda shared the bed with Winnie.  Zelda came from Alabama.  For the men, she said, her voice like syrup, sucking on her cigarette and trying to keep the wave in her short hair.  She cut Winnie’s hair, oiled the resulting curls into a sleek bob and taught her how to smear kohl on her eyes to make the green brighter.

Zelda took her dancing on Saturday nights, and Winnie had never felt so weightless in her life, a dress that swung with her body and stopped at her knees, smoke buoying her lungs, men’s eyes pulling her onto the floor.

She met Frank at the club.  Frank came from a place called Misery, she thought, until he laughed and pulled her closer until she could feel his breath on her ear, and whispered, “Missouri.  Though you’re not wrong, Fred.  You’re not wrong.”

Winifred knew the feeling of a marriage bed, but this wasn’t it.  Frank’s hand on her shoulder made her shiver.  His breath on her neck twisted her stomach, set something off even lower down.

New York meant being free, Zelda said.  Free to talk anarchy, like Emma Goldman in the square.  Free to protest the war.  Free to love as many men or women as you wanted, and to leave them when you would.

Frank called her Fred, and brought her to parties in rundown houses, where women wore trousers and everyone smoked.  He brought her to bed.  She could feel it the next day at the factory, an ache that might have just been yearning for the next time he would show up outside the boardinghouse door.

Winifred only wanted to love Frank.  It was Frank who felt free to do the leaving, with a wink of his ice-chip eyes and a smirk resting easy above the dimple in his chin.  The war left and he went with it, off to new adventures; off to somewhere that had never heard of Francis J. Buchanan, from Misery, USA.

She didn’t even notice it until Lissa asked.  Zelda had vanished months before, without a note or a smoky goodbye kiss.  Lissa stayed quiet on her side of the bed, and it took her four months to wonder if maybe Winnie was ill.

Winifred had thought it was just the hollow space Frank had left behind, bloating her insides and gnawing at her bones.

Mrs. Harding was kind but firm: no girls in Winifred’s condition could stay at the house.  She’d have to find her own lodging.

Lissa, sweet as pudding, went with her, found an old man in Brooklyn Heights willing to rent out his back room in return for hot food and a clean house.

Winifred had kept a man’s house before, in return for a roof over her head.

The bairn had hair darker than a storm cloud rolling in.  Winifred waited for his eyes to change, waited for his face to thin out, but his eyes stayed ice blue, and the dimple never smoothed out of his chin.

Lissa cooed over the child, made strange faces and sang to him when he cried.  Winifred tried not to look at the boy, when it had Frank’s face.  New York meant being free to lie, to say that you’d marry a lass when you never would, to say that you loved her and then leave, to say that you loved your son when you wished more than anything that he’d just leave you be.

She named him James Buchanan, after his father, and the hospital named him Barnes, after the name she’d given them at Ellis Island.  She called herself a war widow, and that was true—one man lost to the war, another leaving her shattered and grey.

It took George another year to find her, after the war ended.  She’d left word in Dublin, but she hadn’t expected him to survive, much less to bother tracking her over oceans and through busy slums.  He was not the husband Winifred had prayed would return.

She made Jamie a year older, made him George’s son and made Lissa promise not to tell, but having a firstborn didn’t please George the way it ought.  He found work, and wages to buy the whiskey that fueled his temper.

He didn’t want to look at the lad and see only a stranger’s face.  Winifred didn’t want to look at the boy and see frosty, smirking eyes winking goodbye.  Lissa married and moved to Schenectady.

The next year, Eliza was born, with George’s muddy eyes and Winifred’s red hair, purple-faced and wailing fresh out of the womb.  George bought a round for the whole bar, and Winifred showed her daughter off to all the women that bustled in.

And no one noticed James, because by two—three, if you asked—James had learned to tuck his face down and stay out of the way.


	3. The Fair Folk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarah had always known - about Jamie, that was. She should have suspected about Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If this is confusing, I preface it a bit in the tumblr post [here](http://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/126212193103/right-so-mamamarvel-in-her-brilliance-requested). Beware a lot of Irish mythology ahead - you can read this as a distinct and separate story from chapter two, but Bucky's origins in at least this chapter are meant to be ambiguous, so what Sarah knows or thinks she sees and what Winifred believes or says could be very different.

Winifred O’Brien Barnes had the sea’s own green eyes, and hair brighter than spun gold.  She swore she’d trade it all for Sarah’s untamed Irish curls, hair like the flaming brush in the Bible, but Sarah didn’t think it was true.  Her husband had eyes like cracked leather left out in the sun, and hair that had faded from yellow to brown as he’d drunk his youth away.

Their three girls – Eliza, Becky, and little Nonie – looked just like them, from tip to toes, a mix of red and blond heads, and bright-eyed gazes the color of sea glass or whiskey.

But Jamie.   _Jamie_.

Sarah shook her head, pursed her lips and leaned against the wall.  The boys hadn’t heard her come in, wrapped up in blankets and each other, Dean Martin crooning through their small radio.  She watched Steve’s blue eyes light up, curled her nails into her palms to keep still when one of Jamie’s long-fingered hands reached out to trace the smile on her son’s face.

Winnie insisted the children have a wooden bedframe.  She kept the iron pans away from the table, and told her children never to touch the stove with their bare hands.  It wasn’t the lad’s fault, she told Sarah, cradling Nonie in her scant lap.

His father hadn’t wanted to wait for the next ship west.  The boy just born, then, the last Barnes to take his first breath of Irish air, and Winnie wanted Father O’Malley to christen her firstborn son.  Her son, with a downy layer of golden hair and an infant’s murky blue eyes.  But her husband said they’d christen the bairn at Ellis Island and baptize him in New York Harbor, and her old world fears could go hang.

It wasn’t the lad’s fault.  But Winnie Barnes had kept her Irish fears swaddled close, and Sarah saw how she flinched when the boy came too near.

Sarah’s Gran had told her all about the fair folk.  Had taught her littlest granddaughter to keep a clean house, and to always leave a bit of cream and bread out at night for their good neighbors.  When she went walking after dark, Sarah knew to close her ears to the irresistible whistle of a pipe and the promise of a whirling dance.

The fair folk danced until their shoes wore out, played and sang tunes more lovely than a mortal could bear to hear.  They had been angels once, her Gran whispered, before the Fall.  Then the Lord closed up Heaven and the Devil closed up Hell, and the fair folk were left in the sea and the barrows, the trees and the air.  They might repay one good deed with another—they might ensnare a mortal with music, with an angel’s face and the devil’s own charms—but you could never trust a sidhe, a fallen angel without a soul to keep it right.

Even their children were tricksters.  Even the changelings, who didn’t know their own true names.

The Barnes’s ship had been delayed.  One month went by, then two, and wee James still hadn’t been baptized.  A healthy, ruddy-cheeked boy.  Winnie had only left him for a second, she swore.  Only to go next door for coals to light the fire.

Fairy children were supposed to howl, with their sharp teeth and bottomless hunger, their bony limbs and selkie-dark eyes.  They died young, everyone said, or grew up all wrong in the body and in the head.

Jamie was healthier than Stevie had ever been, and canny as Sarah’s Gran.  If he was too thin, it was only during winter when he pushed his food onto his sisters’ plates, or served Steve most of their soup in an over-full bowl.

His eyes were the color of the first frost after Samhain.  His eyes were too old, Winnie hissed, as if her fair child might hear and bring misery to their home.  Too old and too wise, too silent where a mortal boy would be loud, too watchful for a human boy.

His fingers had wrapped around Steve’s jaw, quiet as her son pulled him in for a kiss.  Fingers too even, at the tops, ring finger near as long as the other two.  
It would have been Steve who’d begun this thing between them, she knew.  Sarah had watched both boys since they had found each other nearly a dozen years ago, one whose blood ran too hot and the other whose voice sang too sweetly.  Fair child or no, Jamie only sang to the rhythms her son chose.

You couldn’t love a changeling, Sarah’s Gran said, wrinkled face grim.  Wasn’t nothing there to love—fair folk were wood beneath the skin, hollowed out where their souls had been, always gorging and never full.

Sidhe or no, Jamie’s blood ran red when he scraped his knees.  Sarah had been the one to dab away the dirt and drying blood, the one to teach Jamie how to spit on the wound to help the pain.  It was Jamie, more patient than Steven would ever be, who took up Sarah’s Ma’s old brush and stood behind her in the evenings, using his strange fingers to work the tangles from her hair.

You shouldn’t love a changeling, Sarah knew, but Jamie had never brought any harm to their household, and he beamed like a child beneath his old eyes.  She kept her heart latched shut, but Jamie’s nimble fingers had tugged the gate free as if she had invited the boy in.

Winnie Barnes had done as she ought, shown kindness to the sidhe lad without mistaking him for her own.  Sarah, fool that she was, wouldn’t trade Jamie for a hundred mortal boys.

But it was one thing to kiss away a child’s bruises, to sing them to sleep with poor imitations of the enchanting lullabies that they’d heard under the hill.  It was another thing to love a sidhe with hands and lips and fire in your blood, to love them so that you’d damn your own soul when they had none to give.

Sarah coughed.  Stomped each foot, and waited for the boys to snap apart.  Jamie leapt to his feet—too graceful for a boy still growing—and left Steve curled in the blankets by the stove.

“Don’t tell me you’re still scared of Ma,” Steve laughed, loud and red-cheeked like the bairn Winnie had lost.  He leaned back until his head rested against Jamie’s thigh, tilting his face up and smiling easily at his fair friend.  “Stay for dinner, Buck,” he said, easy around Jamie’s winter eyes the way Winnie could never be.  “You can play the harmonica, after, or talk Ma into a dance.”

Jamie danced like a feather in the wind.  Weightless.  Hollowed wood, where his soul was meant to be.  He played the old harmonica he had found like he’d been born with at his lips, music that made Sarah ache for the streets of her home.

“I’ve got to scram,” Jamie replied, running his fey fingers through Stevie’s spun-gold hair.  “Promised Alice I’d take her and her friends to a show, buy them all a coke after.”  He rolled his eyes and Steve snorted, two half-grown boys acting like they hadn’t been thirteen years old only a few years before.

When he looked at Sarah, ice-hewn eyes like a mirror, he saw everything she didn’t want to say.  That was the problem with the fair folk: formed before the first man, fallen and still too knowing by half.

The Devil had given them hearts of stone, her Gran had assured her, but Sarah could see the regret in Jamie’s changeling eyes.  She wasn’t certain if the boy was saddened because he would heed her unspoken demand and let Steve’s soul alone, or if he was sorry to hurt her, but not sorry enough to stop her son from running headlong into his own damnation.

“Come back after,” she said, the words tripping unbidden off her tongue.  “Bring your damned lute, if you must.”  She tugged him down to kiss her cheek, folding his cool hands in her own; Sarah had always run a bit wild, stood too close to the Beltane fire and loved the child from under the hill.

It should not have surprised her, that Steven would be the same.

“You won’t send him away,” her frail, fiery child demanded, as soon as Jamie had swept the door closed.  Sarah wondered if he was begging her, or if he already knew that she was too weak to force a changeling child back to his world.  “I know you saw, Ma.”  Stevie’s chin stuck out, his sky-blue eyes awash with fear he wouldn’t name.  “He loves me.”  His voice wobbled over the words, and Sarah gripped the old wood of the doorframe and wished it were true.

“He can’t,” she breathed, and Steve looked over at the table, where Jamie had already set out cream and bread for the brownies to eat.  “Steven, your soul is—”

“No,” her son interrupted, his eyes watery but his voice firm.  “Even if Bucky – I don’t, I don’t care, Ma.”  He sniffled, and wrapped the blanket tighter around his folded knees.  “I love him.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t think he can love me.”  He cocked his head, watching her in a quiet way he must have learned from his fairest friend.  “You love him, too,” he finally said, an accusation with a faint, knowing smile.  “And it doesn’t matter to you.”

 _Sidhe_ , her brash, American son wouldn’t say.  Pretended not to believe, though he let her and Jamie keep the old ways.  But if Steven Grant would never speak of the good neighbors, or watch for the dullahan’s whip, he knew his own heart.

“No,” she admitted, and settled down beside him, pinching his pinked cheeks and feeling the warmth from his human hands.  “It doesn’t matter to me.”  Her son smiled, and the whole room brightened.  Perhaps the fair folk weren’t so stone-hearted after all, if they warmed to her son’s easy grin.  “He’ll be back this evening,” she promised, and Stevie flung thin arms around her and squeezed.  “And I suppose we’ll three have a dance.”

Fairies repaid good with good, Sarah knew.  And even if Jamie couldn’t love him, he would never let her son fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And, if you were interested, a very short foray back into the Bucky-might-be-a-changeling world (from tumblr):
> 
> Bucky waned, in the Hydra camp, surrounded by metal bars and metal shovels and the thick concrete of their cells. But so did everyone else, pale and thin and flinching at sounds like a fair child would shy away from cold iron.
> 
> He had rubbed at his wrists for weeks, no matter that Steve had shattered the manacles pinning Bucky to the table. Rubbed his wrists and stayed a ghostly white, his eyes the only spot of color in his gaunt face.
> 
> “Looks like he’s going to fade clear away,” Dum Dum muttered one night, following Steve’s gaze across the fire to where Bucky lay, right fingers curled around his left wrist even in his unsettled sleep.
> 
> And Steve didn’t believe in his Ma’s Old World superstitions. He didn’t believe in the brownies that Bucky still left cream for whenever they bunked in someone’s abandoned house - and if he had seen the dullahan’s whip, it was only because fever had folded him into delirium, so that it could have been his own bones coiled in the doctor’s hand.
> 
> Steve didn’t believe, but it didn’t stop him from bartering half a month’s pay for another soldier’s harmonica, leaving it on Bucky’s blankets like an offering, like a saucer of cream and a crust of fresh bread. Bucky brought half of the next Hydra compound to them, harmonica to his lips and the music irresistible to men, the haunting melody of a song written under the hills. When Jones had his trumpet, in London, Steve dragged Bucky onto the floor, flushed red at the stares they got, Bucky’s grace a measure too strong for the world, Steve’s new stamina enough to keep him next to Bucky after the others fell away, exhausted by the endless dance, their flushed faces a poor reflection of Bucky’s glow.
> 
> Steve didn’t believe. But that didn’t stop him from curling his fingers into the scorched marks on Bucky’s wrists and holding on.


End file.
